Number of the Month

April 2008

The lost world

At times of ill health, which have become all too frequent
of late, your bending author retreats into his collection of classic crime
novels, especially Maigret and Nero
Wolfe. They are full of interesting cultural nuances as well as being great
entertainment. Here is a bit from Death of
a Dude by Rex Stout, which seems to say so much about the America the world
has lost.

… hanging on the wall back of
Woody's desk a big card in a homemade frame which said in homemade lettering by
Woody:

‘ALL RIGHT, THEN, I'LL GO TO
HELL’
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Wolfe had asked why that had
been chosen for display in a frame and Woody had said because he thought it was
the greatest sentence in American literature. Wolfe had asked why he thought
that, and Woody had replied because it said the most important thing about
America, that no man had to let anybody else decide things for him, and what
made it such a wonderful sentence was that it wasn't a man who said it, it was a
boy who had never read any books, and that showed that he was born with it
because he was American.

The
zealots march on

That lone purveyor of truth, Christopher
Booker, notes the characteristic carve-up by which the EU coup d’état was
shuffled through the House of Lords, with the help of those whose snouts are
already firmly in the trough. But he goes on to highlight the latest piece of
gratuitous spite by the zealots in
Brussels
with Drink-driving laws way over the limit. This will mean the end of the English rural pub and, as always, picks on
the elderly and disabled. Your bending author has recently joined the ranks of
the officially disabled; so, not being able to walk there, will have to give up
one of the few remaining pleasures in life.

Here is what Sorry, wrong number! had to say about it eight years ago:

It so happens that, being an
academic, I had done a considerable amount of research into the threshold
for increasing probability
of accidents occurred. It happens to
be exactly where the limit was set in the
UK
, 0.08%.

Let us consider one of the more
thorough investigations, which was carried out by Kruger et al
of the
University
of
Wuerzberg
and was a refined version of an earlier study in
Grand Rapids
. In view of my confessed “criminality” in this area, I will not go into my
worries about the statistical methods employed, but take them at face value. At
least they considered drivers who had caused
an accident and tried to provide a
comparison with the general driving population, which are both rare in such
studies. Going straight to the conclusions drawn from this investigation, with
respect to the likelihood of accidents and BAC
(Blood Alcohol Content):

If no one with a BAC
greater than 0.08% drove, a
reduction of 96% would result. Thus, if the legal limit for DUI (Driving Under
the Influence) in
Germany
(0.08%) was an effective deterrent against driving with a higher BAC, this
would mean that nearly everything that could be done to prevent alcohol
-related accidents would have been accomplished. Thus, countermeasures directed
at those persons driving at BACs higher than 0.08% can be expected to be most
effective in reducing the number of accidents attributable to the effects of
alcohol. In contrast, measures directed at drivers with BACs less than 0.08%
cannot be very effective. At most, 4% of all accidents attributable to the
effects of alcohol may be prevented.

Note that these percentages are
of the total estimated to be due to alcohol
, i.e. 10.8% of all accidents. Thus if all driving at above 0.08% were prevented
it is deduced that about 10% of accidents would not occur. Acting below this
threshold would prevent less than 0.4%, which is well below any reasonable level
of significance
.

The conclusion must be that the
right threshold was chosen for the original legislation and any limit set below
this threshold would be purely punitive. It saves no lives and satisfies only
the SIFs
. The person who has a pint while driving home from work poses no extra risk
to anyone. In fact the two studies
mentioned above suggest that there may be
even less risk at this level than in the general population. To be
consistent the SIFs, who are addicted to marginal statistics
, should insist that all drivers should have one drink before they start.
Furthermore, there was a very strong relationship with age, and younger drivers
were much more likely to have an accident due to alcohol
than older ones. In general, the
driver at the legal limit is no more likely to have an accident than one with no
blood alcohol, but above this the risk begins to increase rapidly. The research
can never be done again because legislation is in place in most countries that
prevents comparisons being made.

Those pushing for harsher
legislation should think through the consequences. Of particular concern are
rural communities
. These days we have, more than ever, urban governments
for urban people. Country dwellers
have had their railways and buses taken away by the politicians
and then find themselves under
attack for driving the cars upon which have become so dependent. It is all very
well telling them take a taxi or share a car, but those options are pie in the
sky for many country dwellers. With the decline in the church, the country pub
is often the last cohesive
institution in remote areas and it is heartbreaking to see some of these
businesses being destroyed by policemen
lurking around them in the hope of
improving their computer
ratings for arrests, without getting
into the difficult business of catching burglars. 29% of English parishes now
have no pub
and the proportion is rising. A
rural pub closes down almost every day. A frequent comment heard when policemen
are seen skulking around country pubs
is “When you get burgled they
don’t want to know.” I am ashamed to say that I am one of the many people
who no longer call in on my friends’ pub – not because I would be intending
to commit an offence, but because I have a horror of the harassment and
intimidation that goes with it. Once the local police
spy has your number in her book that
is what you are in for.

I would not wish to leave this
subject without a further reference to the members of pressure groups. Mothers
Against Drunk Driving (MADD) began in 1980, after a 13-year-old girl was killed
by a drunken driver who had several prior offences. This was an appalling crime
that deserved to be punished by imprisonment with the key thrown away.

Drunken driving is a crime against
humanity that deserves punishment. Drink-drive is a technical offence caused by
instrumentation and zealotry. There is nothing we can do about this insane
progression of coercion. Our politicians have surrendered, without our
permission, our right to self-government, while we can expect our own
bureaucrats to gold-plate any dictated action to their own satisfaction. The
whole case for it is based on the usual lies and distortions, including a
completely fictitious number of lives saved. Another usual side effect is a huge
diversion of labour into a non-productive area, while real criminals will
continue to enjoy the freedom of the streets.

Oh to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!
Browning - Home thoughts from abroad

The back garden in April (believe it or not a colour photo). Nothing startling about that.
Oldies have seen it all before; last time about twenty years ago. Species get
caught out, sometimes tragically. There was one year in the eighties when almost
an entire generation of amphibians died under the ice in famously mild
Southampton
. It’s not as though snow represents the coldest weather, as it coincides with
cloud cover. Still it gives the media something to get excited about.

It’s only weather, like that warm spell in January.
Furthermore, though it is hard for the British to understand, the
island
of
Great Britain
is not the globe. The northern hemisphere as a whole has had some of the
harshest winter weather for many a year. A bigger mystery is how someone can get
to be Curator of Kew Gardens without
understanding this, but that’s religion for you.

All right, it's a bit of a cliché to quote Browning in the
circs, but why should THEY have all the best clichés?

An old friend of Number
Watch, Michael O’Ronain, has turned up on Watts Up with that, with a telling
animation of the BBC’s abject surrender to the zealots.

09/04/08

You could not make it up

Your bending author is seriously thinking of giving up
attempts at satire. How can you compete with the absurdity of the new
real world?

13/04/08

The
Junk juggernaut rolls on

It is rather a depressing thought that the Telegraph
is the nearest thing that Britain has to a serious newspaper. This week it has
featured an outbreak of empty scares based on meta-studies, absurdly small
studies and, of course, ridiculous relative risks (RR).

The first was a scare involving a popular vehicle for of
self dosing, vitamins.
While it is clear that people on a normal diet with a normal metabolism are
wasting their money on these supplements, this is no excuse for spreading
unnecessary alarm. With one possible exception, extra vitamins are simply
useless. The exception is vitamin A. While a deficiency of this compound can
cause serious diseases, including childhood blindness and death, an excess can
suppress growth; stop menstruation; damage red blood corpuscles and cause skin
rashes, headaches, nausea, and jaundice.

Nevertheless, a meta-study yielding RRs of1.16 or less adds nothing to the sum of human happiness and merely
fuels pointless scare journalism.

Breast cancer has long been a favourite of the
scare-mongers. For understandable reasons it roused fear in all women. It is
frequently used to provide ammunition for the zealots, so the research tends to
be directed towards their favourite targets. Now we are told that one
glass of wine a day increases the risk of breast cancer (RR
1.07). Sandy tells about the
provenance of this vital "research". In the very same week other “experts” picked on another favourite
target, obesity. A small study (Trojan Number547)
indicated that fat women with breast cancer are more likely to die than their
slim sisters (RR about 1.4). We are not told just how many were regarded as obese, but even
if it were about a half of them, the number of excess deaths would be of the
order of 12.

As we have observed before, small studies are not just
useless, they are malign, as the phenomenon of funnel
plots reveals.

Just in case you did not get the message from our sponsors,
the risk
of Alzheimer’s is increased for smokers, drinkers and those with raised
cholesterol. The inclusion of tobacco is interesting, because before the Great
Censorship, it was widely accepted that
smokers were half as likely to get Alzheimer’s as non-smokers (likewise
Parkinson’s to boot). Indeed, this promoted one of the first uses of the word paradox
as a paranym.

What a strange coincidence it is that the causes of these
diseases all happen to be the favourite targets of various groups of zealots and
not something else, such as lettuce.

Your bending author coined the term “passive drinking”
for the 2000 book Sorry, wrong number! Coupled
with “toe-nail cancer” it was meant to be so absurd that no one could
mistake it for a real example. It has subsequently been used in these pages to
help explain such concepts as Trojan Number and Publication
Bias.

But there are no jokes in the world of the zealots, so now we
have this.

It illustrates so many of the contentions in March
of the zealots, particularly the way the success of the anti-tobacco
campaign has inspired the other puritans.

Footnote: We
are reminded that Number Watch featured the headline It was meant to
be a joke twice in its early days, appropriately in the month of April in
the years 2001 and 2002.
The satirical inventions that became true were "microclusters" and
"potato crisps cause cancer". Risky business, making little jokes!

18/04/08

Flowers
in the desert

When you have spent years of your life attempting to defend
a cause, such as scepticism (i.e. traditional science), it is easy to become
despondent in the face of an implacable and ruthless foe: more so when your
opponents appear to have absolute domination over the establishment media.

There is, however, plenty of evidence that, while the
faithful have achieved control over enormous financial and communication
resources, all is not well for them among ordinary thinking folk. Whether it is
in addressing groups of intelligent, informed people (such as engineers or
insurers) or just talking to people in the remaining pubs, it becomes clear that
a strong vein of scepticism (even cynicism) survives among the populace. While,
for example, the self-satisfied political and media classes prattle on about
global warming and the necessity of economic sacrifice to the new gods, when
anybody bothers to ask them people in the street reveal quite
different priorities.

The other cheering observation is that independent
journalism still survives locally across North America. This is revealed to Number
Watch by links that come up in the on-line statistics of hits to the site.
Regularly, supportive comments turn up from the most unexpected sources, such as
Canadian local radio stations or US local newspapers and web sites, e.g., most
recently, Dakota
Voice.

The disjunction between the politico-media establishment
and ordinary people is a feature of our age. A glaring example is the conspiracy
(a much abused word, but no other will suffice) to deprive ordinary European
voters of a say in the imposition of a grotesquely undemocratic constitution.
There is little doubt that most countries of Europe, given the choice, would
reject this option, as they have done in the past; so the new elite have decided
to deprive them of that choice. Just browse through EU
Referendum to see some of the extraordinary deceptions and manoeuvres that
this campaign has required. Small, impoverished groups, such as UKIP
or the Freedom Association, stand up to the
Goliaths of bureaucratic control, but they struggle to make their voices heard.

The big question is whether the isolated blooms of
free-thinking human independence can survive and prosper in the wasteland that
is modern politics, or whether Orwell’s gloomy vision is our future.

Today your bending author dons his red rose for St
George’s day and Shakespeare’s birthday, while joining in the cry of rage
from the Englishman in his castle
at the perfidy of the traitors in our midst.

Footnote: perhaps this is a suitable
day to link to the frequently asked question of the origin of "bending
author". It was explained back in 2001 here.

Panic!

There are increasing signs that the global warmers are
rushing out to place each way bets on which way the climate will jump. The motto
is “Get your rationalisation in first”. A correspondent who rejoices in the
soubriquet of Perigo Minas draws attention to this
attempt to establish that even if it gets colder it’s still your fault. It
will delight collectors of non sequiturs. In particular, apparently the Little
Ice Age was caused by the Mediaeval Warm Period. It now seems that the latter
actually happened after all, Hockey Stick notwithstanding, but we are not
offered an explanation as to why it happened. It must all have been some
political incorrectness that those naughty Plantagenets got up to. Let us be
thankful that we are so much more sophisticated now and have discovered the true
religion.

Satisfying to see the RSPB caught
out in hypocrisy. They have prevented the traditional control of raptors and
then blame everyone else for the decline of songbirds.

Declaration of interest: this is personal. We saw our
treasured song thrush carried off by a sparrow hawk a decade ago and have never
had one since. We have had to stop feeding birds at the bird table because the
sparrow hawk took to arriving in time for lunch. Magpies and carrion crows are
spreading remorselessly.

They have now been casting round for villains to blame for
the loss of migratory birds, including (wait for it, wait for it) global
warming. How few small birds do they think it takes to raise a family of
raptors? Yet they celebrate the resurgence of birds of prey.

In the old days farmers took it upon themselves to maintain
a sensible balance by controlling raptor populations. But nowadays, of course,
we know better.

Cooked up by the Eurocrats and their lobbying friends in
the big industrial cartels that haunt Brussels, this
will produce the usual deafening silence from the political classes.

The
tyranny tightens the screw

To get the following into context it is important to
remember that it refers to a time when violent
crime is worse than ever. Children are shooting and stabbing each other in
the streets and burglaries, theft and shoplifting are carried out with impunity
in the almost total absence of police on the streets. We are governed not by
elected representatives, but
by officials.

In the Democratic Socialist Republic of Hull a mother was
fined £75 for dropping a piece of sausage
roll when feeding her toddler. It was immediately gobble up by pigeons.

Draconian laws that were forced through Parliament as being
absolutely necessary to track criminals and terrorists have been used for a
variety of quite different purposes. A couple and their three children were put
under surveillance without their knowledge by Poole Borough Council for more
than two weeks. Their crime (of which they were innocent) was to be suspected of
the grievous middle class sin of trying to do their best for the children in
defiance of rules of socialist equality.

The common characteristic of these tawdry tales is the
employment of enormous numbers of people at the taxpayers’ expense, a
non-productive army who are dragging down the already precarious economy. They
have no connection with police or judiciary, yet are empowered to act as judge
and jury in the imposition of fines on a scale that is out of all proportion to
those imposed for what were once real crimes.

For this is Envirocrime,
Orwellian Newspeak for a whole new
raft of offences, mostly inspired by EU directives (but don’t let the public
know that, because ourleaders like
to maintain the pretence that they are still in charge) which have given rise to
an era of surveillance and oppression that realises Orwell’s nightmare. This
leads us to:

Number of the month - 4

A father of four in Cumbria now has a criminal
record. His crime is to overfill his refuse bin so that the lid was ajar by
all of four inches. The prosecution claim
that this was in fact seven inches (clearly a hanging offence). Perhaps his
offence would have been mitigated if it were for ten centimetres.

Here in West Wiltshire we received a full colour leaflet
with the mind-numbing headline Exciting
developments in recycling. One of the pleasures of moving here had been to
find that the binmen were so helpful; nothing was too much trouble. Then
recently, they were accompanied by a man with a clipboard, clearly teaching them
how to be intractable. We are not only to have two different bins, but we are
provided with plastic crates for recyclables. How is anyone who walks with a
stick supposed to carry a crate? A separate large refuse vehicle, fully manned
and spouting dreaded pollution, collects cardboard only. One poor old lady was
seen this week struggling down to the community recycling bins with a large
plastic bag in one hand, because she could not carry a crate through her house.
In some areas people who leave for work before 7 am are faced with fines for
putting out their rubbish too early.

Elderly people live in fear of breaking complicated rules
that they do not understand and do not seem to make any sense. They do not
realise that the whole purpose is to force them into ritualistic behaviour for
reasons of religion.